Jordan Center MA Research Symposium

The NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia is excited to announce the launch of our new annual master’s research symposium and undergraduate research symposium! This Spring, we will host 20 undergraduates and 20 master’s students at two separate symposia for a day of presentation, discussion, networking, and exploration!

The Master's Research Symposium will feature presentations on a broad array of topics on panels chaired by leading scholars in the field. See the program below!

The symposium will be held in the Jordan Center at 19 University Place on the Second Floor. Non-NYU affiliates must RSVP to attend. This event will not be recorded or streamed on Zoom.

PROGRAM

Research - History: 10:00 - 11:15 AM

1. Muling He (Harvard University) - Asserting Socialism in Uzbek Neighborhoods, 1917 - 1967

2. Dasha Prokhorova (University of Pittsburgh) - Friends with Benefits: Burgeoning Soviet-Cuban Relations in Poslantsy Kuby – Nashi gosti (Cuban Envoys – Our Guests) and My s toboi, Kuba (We Are with You, Cuba)

3. Danielle Wallner (Brandeis University) - Building Cybernetics: Andrei Ershov and the Siberian School

4. Rachel L. Neubuhr Torres (Arizona State University) - Doukhobor Rituals at the Turn of the Century

Chair: Tatiana Linkhoeva (New York University)

Break: 11:15 - 11:30 AM

Research - Political Science: 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

1. Jessica Maria Maksimov (Georgetown University) - Intervention, What is it Good For? Poland and Russia’s Competition for Influence in Ukraine, 2004-2013

2. Kiley McCormick (Harvard University) - Kremlin Disinformation on WMDs in the Context of the Recent Conflict in Ukraine

3. Franklin Shobe (Seton Hall University) - Governance Devolution in Ukraine: Key to the Future?

4. Olga Kiyan (Harvard University) - Working in the Shadows: Determinants and Impacts of Informal Employment in Russian Labor Markets

Chair: Joshua Tucker (New York University)

Keynote & Lunch: 12:45 - 1:45 PM

Dr. Yevgenia M. Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, author, and radio host. She has been Political Editor and then Editor-in-Chief and CEO of The New Times, a Moscow-based, Russian language independent political weekly, since 2007. On February 28 2022, Vladimir Putin blocked its website, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Despite that, Albats contines to run the newtimes.ru, and she kept reporting from Russia until she had to leave the country in the last week of August 2022 after she was fined for her coverage of the war with Ukraine and pronounced a foreign agent. Since 2004, Albats has hosted “Absolute Albats,” a talk-show on Echo Moskvy, the only remaining liberal radio station in Russia. The radio station was taken off the air a week after the war in Ukraine started. Albats moved her talk show to her YouTube channel that now has over 100k subscribers. Albats was an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow assigned to the Chicago Tribune in 1990, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1980 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 2004. She has been a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since its founding in 1996. Albats taught at Yale in 2003-2004. She was a full-time professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, teaching the institutional theory of the state and bureaucracy and theory of regimes, until 2011 when her courses were banned at the request of top Kremlin officials. In 2015 Albats was awarded Tufts University’s Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award. In 2017, Albats was chosen as an inaugural fellow at Kelly Writers House and Perry House at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2019-2020 she taught authoritarian politics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Albats is the author of the four independently researched books, including one on the history of the Russian political police, the KGB, whose graduates are running the country today. She has a daughter and claims Moscow, Russia as her home.

Research - Literature and History: 1:45 - 3:00 PM

1. Jangul Erlon-Baurjan (Harvard University) - Flight and Fugitivity in Chingiz Aitmatov's Jamila

2. Josh Valdez (New York University) - "Toska" and the Russian Literary Split from the West

3. Ekaterina Kokovikhina (University of Pennsylvania) - The Disco Phenomenon under the late Socialism

4. Kyle O’Hara (New York University) - Russification More Profoundly: Analyzing the Impact of Literacy Education in the Tsarist Far East

5. Jake Perl (New York University) - Transliterating Şura: Building a collection of translated, machine readable editions of a
   pre-Soviet Tatar literary and political journal

Chair: Eileen Kane (Connecticut College)

Break: 3:00 - 3:15 PM

Research Panel - Political Science: 3:15 - 4:45 PM

1. Anastasia Zhu (Georgetown University) - Russia-China Pipeline Gas Outlook

2. Davit Gasparyan (Harvard University) - The South Caucasus and China: A Complicated and Incompatible Relationship

3. Nikhil Jain (Columbia University) - Beneath the Crescent: Azerbaijan and Pan-Turkism in the 2020s

4. Taylar Rajic (American University) - Banditi of Brothers: Wagner, Strategic Competition and Russia’s Return to Africa

Chair: Alexander Cooley (Barnard College)